Potential Employee Blog Dangers

Posted on December 12, 2006

Internet Business Law Services has a detailed article explaining the risks employee blogs have on employers and ways employers can lessen this risk. The article includes the following list of employee blog dangers.

Defamation Claims. Defamation claims represent a growing threat to employers as a result of the increased popularity of employee maintained blogs. To the same extent that an employer may be liable for defamatory publications of its employees, an employer may also be liable for an employee's defamatory private blog on topics that fall within the scope of the employee's employment or within the employee's actual or apparent authority. Even if an employee's statements are outside the scope of employment, an employer may find itself named as a defendant in a defamation suit if the blogging employee is the supervisor of the defamed individual or the employee's blog references the employer. The chance that an innocent employer may be a defendant in the latter situation is increased because bloggers often blog anonymously, leaving the employer as the only readily identifiable potential source of the defamatory blog.
Harassment Claims. An employer may also be subject to liability for sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims based on an employee's private blogging activities, if a supervisor authors inappropriate comments about an employee or if the employer had knowledge that an employee authored harassing blogs about a co-employee. For example, in Blakey v. Continental Airlines, a pilot filed a hostile work environment claim against Continental Airlines arising out of derogatory comments posted about her on a pilots' electronic bulletin board operated by a third-party service provider. The court held that Continental Airlines has a duty to take effective measures to stop co-employee harassment when it knows or has reason to know that such harassment is part of a pattern of harassment taking place in settings related to the workplace. The Blakey decision confirms that employer liability may extend beyond mere employer-provided blogs.
Economic Damages to Employers. An employer's business itself may be harmed by defamatory comments on employee blogs. Employees may use blogs as a means to anonymously defame employers, supervisors, or other employees which may harm employee morale, result in a loss of good will with patrons, or damage the employer's public image. In the late 1990s, for example, Southern Pacific Funding Corporation filed for bankruptcy after its stock prices fell from a high of $17 to $1 - a spiral triggered by blog postings claiming that company executives were covering up multi-million dollar embezzlement, exaggerating economic forecasts and putting the company up for sale.
Disclosure of Confidential Information. Blogging activities may also result in the unauthorized release of company information and data into the public domain. Whether published by a disgruntled employee or a loyal yet naive worker, a blog that discusses an employer's confidential, business or financial information may have far-reaching and harmful consequences for the employer, such as the dissemination of trade secrets. Similarly, the unwanted release of business or financial information may result in securities law violations, such as unlawful release of inappropriate information in advance of an initial public offering.

These employee blog dangers, such as disclosure of confidential information, can also be done using older technology like paper or phones but blogs do have the potentially to rapidly spread information on the Internet. While these dangers are all very real the article did not list the risks of a company having no employee blogs at all. One growing risk of having no employee blogs is that you might be missing out some beneficial exposure for your company to bloggers and new customers. To be fair the article is really talking about the risk from personal blogs written by employees and not corporate blogs employees write for the company.